President Biden spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping and mentioned Beijing’s eliminationist policies toward the mostly Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang. “There will be repercussions for China,” the 46th president said to the man who oversees the genocide, which is aimed at ending the Uighur people as a people, by making sure they can’t procreate or by making sure that when they do have children, it’s with the Chinese officials who raped them, or by making sure they are disabused from carrying their culture and identity to another generation or by killing them.
Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar noted Biden’s line on “repercussions,” stating that “China is carrying out enslavement, torture, rape, forced sterilization and mass detention of Uighurs. Now is the time for full accountability and justice.” Omar is right to make this statement, but it also a somewhat meaningless one, thanks to its reliance on the increasingly common, increasingly euphemistic buzzword “accountability.” What would “accountability” mean for a genocidaire such as Xi? War? Sanctions (which Omar has called an act of war)? Mere fact-finding, like what the BBC is doing? Unclear.
This “accountability” talk is, I think, an unexamined part of today’s pseudotherapeutic online rhetorical toolkit. It needs to be de-euphemized. Stick with me here for two pretty different examples:
1.) New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo knowingly covered up thousands of deaths caused by his policy to send coronavirus-infected patients into nursing homes to keep hospital beds free, even as a hospital ship sat ready and empty on a Manhattan pier. He then lied about it because he feared federal prosecution. Of this, Democratic state Sen. Andrew Gounardes said: “There needs to be full accountability for what happened, and the legislature needs to reconsider its broad grant of emergency powers to the governor.”
2.) Olivia Smith of the website GritDaily describes her objection to the new audio-only social media app Clubhouse: “On Twitter, celebrities and other figures are often held accountable for the things they’ve posted in the past. … On Clubhouse, however, there are no screenshots. There is no way to drag up old Clubhouse posts years later like a user might do on Twitter. There is no way to record conversations — meaning there is no way to prove that someone said anything controversial at all. There’s no path to accountability. Users on Clubhouse know, or at least believe, that they can openly speak their mind with zero repercussions.”
By producing accountability, goes the stock phrase, we can “hold people to account.” But the holding and the accounting should not be conflated. Information gathering is what your accountant does before filing your taxes. Repercussions, punishment: That’s a different thing. Not everyone should be in the business of investigation and punishment in a healthy society.
When you hear a call for “accountability,” remember to ask, “Accountable to whom?” Does this person have any right or reason to know or punish? State senators have every right to oversee governors. The world should know about genocides, though force is the only real tool to end them, so it is largely just diversionary talk if we mention “repercussions” or “justice” without specifying anything we propose to do about it. Beware, though, of people who deem it a bad thing if fellow citizens can “openly speak their mind with zero repercussions.” This is a Stasi conception of “accountability,” where everybody has some role in the quasi-official apparatus for the surveillance and punishment of everyone else. Informants aren’t known for holding power to account; they’re known for being its tools.
